


puzzle pieces

by zefo



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Father-Daughter Relationship, Father-Son Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-10-23 19:30:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10725741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zefo/pseuds/zefo
Summary: The late Emperor's missing ship returns. As Luke, Rey, and the Knights of Ren battle for control of the cache of darkside artifacts secreted away within, they are taken for an unexpected ride.





	puzzle pieces

**Author's Note:**

> There's so many time travel fics, and hardly any of them are about the TFA characters going back. It seems like some prime untapped potential, especially for old Luke and Kylo dealing with Vader.

**Orbital Shipyard CC-24, Castell System, 34 ABY**

 

In the past CC-24 had been a hub of activity, servicing and manufacturing small scale shuttles and crafts for the empire. Hundreds of identical stations had existed throughout the galaxy, great wheel-like behemoths slowly rotating on a spokes, spitting out TIEs and Lambas for the empire. However, for all that it was indistinguishable to the other shipyards of its type, CC-24 was special.

Because it was here that a daring crew had stolen the Emperor’s personal yacht right out from under the nose of three Star Destroyers.

The story had spread like wildfire despite the empire’s best efforts to suppress it. It did not matter that the ship and crew were never seen again. It did not matter that the admirals of each destroyer had been executed in disgrace (rumor had it that one had already been dead, apparently choosing to eat his own blaster than report failure.). The damage has been done. Pirates and smugglers everywhere had been emboldened by the tale.

Apparently, even the scum of the galaxy needed hope, and Lando had given it to them.

So it came as a surprise to no one that, after the fall of the empire, CC-24 was taken over by criminals and became a junk yard for ship thieves. For over thirty years it served as station to scrap or refuel stolen ships.

Then the First Order came.

Now, CC-24 rotated in orbit around Castell, slowly falling closer to the planet with each passing year. No lights flickered within the once bustling shipyard. The airwaves were silent, not a single transmission going in or out. The cold vacuum of space invaded the once lively station, ensuring that not even the lowliest and most desperate smuggler could find safe haven here. After almost forty years, the shipyard was dead.

But history was not done with CC-24 yet.

A ship dropped out of hyperspace near the old station. Or rather, what remained of a ship. Hypersace rings gently propelled a twisted hunk of metal into a decrepit hangar. It docked there quietly, an even darker smudge in the black of abandoned station, waiting for its master to claim it.

The emperor’s yacht had finally returned.

 

* * *

 

 

The sound of her own breathing was unnervingly loud in Rey’s helmet. She had always dreamed of flying a ship but this… this was not a ship. The beam of her flash light cut a wide path across the empty corridor. Ships were pressurized. Ships had gravity. Ships had lights and life and movement. In front of her, bits of transparisteel from a shattered window rotated slowly, eternally suspended in the cold of space. She carefully adjusted the thrusters in her suit to avoid the debris. No, this was not a ship. It was a corpse.

 

A shard of transparisteel glittered red in the light. Ice seemed to flood Rey’s space suit as she jerked the light to reveal a body impaled on the broken window. Sightless, glassy eyes of a human male stared at Rey pleadingly. The sound of her breathing became deafening as it picked up. Luke had only sensed the disturbance a few days ago… there was no way the body could have become that feted and rotten already. Just like Lando described…

“Rey.” She gasped sharply and nearly dropped her flashlight as Luke’s voice came through the com. “It’s ok. Just breathe deeply.”

She closed her eyes and did as instructed, trying to will her heart back out of her throat. "Sorry, Master Luke." She murmured, abashed. Her shielding had slipped.

“That’s good, Rey.” His calm and soothing voice spoke over the com, filling the deathly silence. “Reach out with the force. What do you feel?”

Inelegant, fumbling like a newborn, she stretched her sensed out and saw… nothing. Just the stars, and cold of space. Her brow furrowed. No… that wasn’t quite right. Not stars… living beings. And the cold. The cold was…

“Kylo!”  Her eyes snapped open as she gasped out, anger now flashing through her alongside fear. “The Knights of Ren are here!”

“Plan A, then.” Her master replied wryly

 

Avoiding the grisly body still half hanging out the window, Rey floated over, peeking out at the view of the hangar not too far away and setting down to wait for Luke. She gripped luke- vad- ana- … her saber tightly. It was odd; she was a scavenger, she never had a problem taking or re-purposing objects, but she could never think of the saber as hers. It wasn’t even that the hilt was too large for her hand. It just… didn’t belong.

Rey didn’t have to wait long for Luke to begin executing the plan. Her eyes widened as the blast doors to the hangar ripped away – _along with half the kriffing wall._ She floated in stunned silence as Master Luke, little old Luke who sat around on rocks and excelled at talking endlessly and not actually doing anything with the force other than meditate and levitate a rock or two, ignited his saber in one hand and hurled the blast doors at the Knights with the other. As the knights rushed into action, he danced and weaved around the hallway to the hangar, using his suit thrusters to propel himself around the room.

Despite being so outnumbered, Luke was keeping all seven of his opponents at bay. It was clear to Rey that he was more skilled with a blade, but all those years as a pilot were also paying off. Luke spun away from a pike thrust, assisting himself with a force push and sailing under the swing of a vibro blade from another. As the blade wielder spun from his overreaching swing, Luke had already moved away underneath him. The knights kept trying to reorient themselves to what they perceived as “up” and  
“down” on the space station, while Luke used all three dimensions of space and threw away and concept of ground.

But despite his superior skill, Luke was still pushed back down the hallway. In a battle like this, all it would take is one cut to depressurize a suit and suffocate an opponent in space.

The flash of a red saber igniting snapped her out of it. Kylo Ren had joined the fight. Time was running out.

Rey pulled herself out the window and propelled herself into open space. For ten terrifying seconds, she was free of the station: Nothing to hold on to, nothing to push herself against, just her and the terrifying openness of space.

Then she passed through the jaws of the hangar, and she let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Drifting closer to the hunk of metal that was the remains of the Emperor’s yatch, the cold feeling intensified. She was beginning to doubt that the cold feeling had been coming from Kylo after all… She reached out, both with the force and physically, placing her hand against the side of the ship.

**_Come inside… come inside… come inside…._ **

The shiver that ran up her spine had nothing to do with the icy feeling in the force. Her blue blade sprang to life and plunged into the twisted metal. She began carving a door for herself. Not because any creepy voices were whispering for her to come inside. Certainly not.

She was going in to plant a karking shipload of bombs.

Rey completed a rough circle and pulled the section out. It floated away easily, weightless in space. Careful to avoid touching the molten sides, she pulled herself inside-

-And screamed as the whisper became the howling of a hundred voices, all clamoring for her attention.

 ** _LookintomyeyesChoosemecangiveyoupowerLetmein_** pathetic scavenger ** _EraseregretSubmit_** snoke wants ** _LOOKATMEmakeyoustrongneveraloneagain_** first, then finish ** _alwayshungryMOREMOREMORE_**

One…One of those voices wasn’t in her head. It was… it was in her com. The general com frequency on her space suit! She tried to focus and push the voices away, but the best she could do was turn them into a low buzz. She was… lying on the ground, so the ship must have working gravity. It was a circular room with a pedestal in the middle. She could see a hole in the roof where she had cut her way in. Odd objects lay scattered around, and directly in front of her crouched a dark figure. Kylo ren. His hand reached for her head in a gesture like on Takodana…

 

Rey closed her hand around the nearest object and smashed it down on Kylo’s hand.

A surprised yell distorted through the vocoder as Ren snatched his arm back. The sound never reached Rey. A much louder voice had risen from muted buzzing, clear and smooth.

**_You can go back and erase all regrets_ **

Her eyes darted to the object in her hand. It was a large ornate cube. Most of it was metal, some kind of design etched into the outside…or perhaps the seams of interlocking junctions. Each face held a jagged, multifaceted shard crystal. In the shining faces of a white crystal she could see. See everything

_Kylo Ren is lying in the snows of star killer base. She does not hesitate. She does not wait for him to rise. She strikes him through the heart, and Han is avenged_

**_You can go back and fix it_ **

_A shuttle flies from the desert world of Jakku, but this time, she is on it. A small girl laughs as she is enveloped by the arms of her mother and father._

“Drop it.” She does not hear Kylo Ren’s command, nor the wavering hint of worry in his voice. All she hears is the voice; all she sees is the past and future-that-could-be dancing in the crystal.

**_You_ **

_She is a young girl, practicing her forms with Master Luke and all the other children at his Jedi temple_

**_Can_ **

_The winds buffet her x-wing as it climbs into the sky. A thrill shoots through her as she breeches atmosphere and flies into open space. She hits the hyper drive and sits back, watching the blue rings wash over her fighter. Soon, she will be at her first deployment. After the empire, the republic wasn’t going to take any chances with these “First Order” guys._

**_Fix_ **

“Rey.” Luke pleads. There’s a feather light touch on her arm. When did he get here? Was… was he even here? No. No it didn’t matter. “Rey, please, put it down. Don’t listen, don’t-“

**_EVERYTHING_ **

Rey presses a tendril of the force into the box, and for a single moment, the universe stops. No one breathes. And then Rey feels the force being dragged through her and into the box. Panic wells up in her as she tries to pull back, but it’s like trying to stop the ocean. It burns and burns, too much, all flowing through her. It feels like the entirety of the force is washing through her, pressing down, and it’s too much. She’ll be crushed.

Kylo is suddenly in her face, holding hard to her shoulders and shaking her. “STOP! STOP YOU STUPID GIRL! YOU COULD KILL US ALL!”

And Luke, Luke IS here. He’s clutching her arm, eyes closed and brow furrowed in concentration, and suddenly her burden feels lighter. The force is flowing through two now, instead of one. But it was still too much.

“Mster” She tries to speak, but her words come out slurred. Her tongue is too thick and she can’t say what she wants. Can’t say that she’s sorry, for whatever the hell is happening,  how happy and over whelmed she is because he is here with her, helping her through it and hasn't abandoned her; guilty, because now whatever this object is doing to her, will now happen to him too.

He squeezes her hand tighter, and she knows that he knows.

“It’s too late Ben.” And, oh, how grateful Rey was for Master Luke’s unflappable calm because right now it is a life line, keeping the rising fear and panic from overwhelming her. “It can’t be stopped. The only thing we can do is help her through it.”

Kylo’s helmeted head snaps over to glare to Luke. He stares silently, and Rey sobs as the moment stretches on, because the pain of the force being dragged through her is becoming unbearable. A snarl rips from the vocoder and Rey gasps, because suddenly there is a third connection, wild and erratic, but it’s enough, enough power flowing through the three of them for the box.

And then all the force flowing into the box exploded outward, and the universe shuddered.

 

 

* * *

 

0 ABY

“Don’t look all mournful like that, kid. We’re alive.” Han flicked a switch, prepping the ship for hyper space.

Luke pressed his hand against the window of the cockpit in the Falcon as they fled the planet. Vrogas Vas shrunk away beneath them. “I know, Han. It’s just… I’m never going to get back to that temple. I was close to… something.” The hair on the back of his neck prickled. Was the force trying to tell him something…? “…and now I’ll never know.”

 

* * *

 

 

Yoda hummed as he stared at the stump Obi-wan had occupied a moment ago. There had been an upheaval in the force, and then Obi-wan had… rippled, like the reflection in a pond disturbed by a rock. Troubling, this was. Unclear, the future now. The force….  lighter, now felt.

 The old Master slowly smiled. It had been a long time since he had a pleasant surprise.

 

 

* * *

 

Palpatine scowled as he tried to sink back into meditation. Being thrown from it so suddenly by the shockwave in the force had been aggravating and disorienting. But now… he tried to peel back the veil of the future, and found it to be an iron curtain.  Not only that, but the dark side of the force felt incredibly…diminished.

No, this will not stand. He had worked for years to create this dark galaxy. Darth Sidious, Lord of the Sith, would not abide this rebalancing of the force.

 

* * *

  


Darth Vader was getting rather tired of watching the falcon fly away. This time, however, he couldn’t muster any anger as he watched it go. He might not be leaving Vrogas Vos with his son, but he had gained something almost as valuable. Time. He could catch the boy again, but if Karbin had delivered the boy to the Emperor…

He reached out for the boy through the force. So close he could feel it, a bond half formed. If only his son would acknowledge it…

Vader’s attempt to contact his son was shattered as an explosion ripped through the force. The magnitude of the disturbance was so great, Vader half expected a shudder to pass through the physical world. He reached out for his son again, desperate to check and make sure his son hadn't been harmed in the violent turbulence that rocked the force-

-And reeled in shock as his son reached back.

_Father?_

**Author's Note:**

> Guys, i swear. This one is going to get done. I won't abandon it like my fifty other stories. For real this time. 
> 
> As for why Kylo doesn't attack Rey or Luke while she's holding the cube... well, it seems rather unwise to pick a fight in a room full of dark side artifacts that can do any of a million nasty things, and the person you want to fight is messing around with one and might blow everyone up.
> 
> so, no sudden moves. 
> 
> not that it helped anyway.


End file.
